The recent discovery published in BioScience by a group of scientists adds evidence that more data makes less sense in science and climatology, and brings additional evidence of how little humans can rationally influence the environment.

The article elaborates evidence that reservoirs created by dams are an essential source of greenhouse gases, which are understood as a significant influence on global warming. Most probably, there is no doubt that the article relies on reliable scientific methods. Methane is produced in large quantities from enormous surfaces of water trapped behind artificial dams.

Therefore, I do not challenge the science behind this article, but the science behind the concept of man-produced and consequently man-controllable global warming. This article helps me a great deal in this respect. Why?

Because it adds evidence for complexity behind global warming issues, complexity emerges with the number of interrelated items through a network (Stuart Kauffman: A World Beyond Physics).  More evidence for the linearity of global warming, less probable it becomes.

Consider this series of questions that fuel the global warming phenomenon.

Complexity of points

1. How many points in the atmosphere do we measure? We know that we can not measure all points around the globe up to 100.000 meters high in the Earth’s stratosphere. But then we see that we do not always have to weigh all points. We can calculate averages – but again, those averages are more accurate with each additional measurement point and shorter time lapses between measurements. We can now predict the weather for the next ten days on micro measurements for a “point” of approximately 5 square km. While this is a joke in micro measurement, an even more critical trick happens in climatology, in the macro analysis.
2. In climatology, macro measurements come into play. However, macro measurement also means macro time scale. In macro measurement, 100.000 years means as much as 1 second of our life or even less. Can we make a difference between 100.000 years ago and 200.000 years ago as meaningful for the climate to change? Even less, we can evaluate climate change on a scale of 200 years, which is supposed to belong to the Anthropocene era. (By the way: the idea of the scientific community to declare the Anthropocene era as starting with the Industrial Revolution is naive, ideological, and anti-scientific. The hell: stupid! First, we can not say when humans appeared on Earth since, according to evolutionary theory, this would be the utmost stupidity. Second, to erase 99% of human history from the Anthropocene era is something one can only understand as blindness provoked by the notion that technology replaced a mighty God.) Due to such confusions in macro measurement, climate change proponents compare (unreliable) short-term temperature rises with quite reliable long-term trends.
3. And then there is another utterly unresolved question to which the mentioned article adds problems. Namely, what influences Earth’s climate, and how much does each influence it? It should be pretty clear that there is no such thing on Earth that would not affect thermodynamic equilibrium. We know that the butterfly wing movement in China could, in theory and practice, influence a storm in the USA. This is not a metaphor. It is only a metaphor, as it clearly explains that it is impossible to list all the events provoked by a butterfly in China to a storm in the USA. But this is only one event that happens each moment at each point of our atmosphere.

Nature is irreducible

To manipulate Earth’s climate, what has to be done is to permute all results of all three above questions. And since each of the three questions produces a permuted (huge) number of possible outcomes, the permutation of all results brings many options and relations higher than the number of atoms in the entire Universe. We will understand relations with scientific experiments better every day. Still, we will never be able to develop an algorithm that describes the system and allows us to influence it with predictable results.

Even more. As Stuart Kauffmann clearly describes in A World Beyond Physics, the biosphere is irreducible and not explainable by any algorithm in principle.

The article in BioScience is thus crucial, for it adds additional evidence to the complexity of climate to those who still believe someday we will be able to deduce it to a manageable algorithm. However, it is also crucial because it brings cognitive dissonance to all prophets of the renewable energy mantra. Hydropower was acclaimed as one of the “cleanest” and “carbon-free” energy sources available. With solar panels being inefficient and causing problems in disposing of used solar panels, now we have hydropower not only to be blamed for huge “visual” damages to Mother Nature, and as a crucial global warming factor. Global-warming-panic-makers, you will have to read some philosophy and learn that sometimes less is more and more is less.